First, the company's developers have spent the past two years manually building maps of concepts and how they are related so "by looking at the questions [in search queries], we know what concepts are involved." Also, instead of indexing search results based on the words found on a Web page, Hakia uses a technique it calls Qdexing to bring back more relevant search results. Qdexing involves the analysis of individual Web pages for the "knowledge bits," like dates, names, events and other pieces of relevant information to help generate better search results.

"We spend much more time on any given page to understand the concepts involved, the credibility of the page and many things like that," Berkan said. "The number of pages [returned from a query] doesn't really matter much if you think about it. The number of knowledge bits is the important thing."